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Barbara Stanwyck’s Best

“Steel-True,” the massive new biography of Barbara Stanwyck by Victoria Wilson, is volume one of two, and it only takes us through 1940. (Stanwyck lived until 1990.) But Stanwyck was an actress who hit her stride early. The qualities that made her great, that made her, as the film critic Nell Minow says, the most eternally modern of Golden Age actresses, were evident from the beginning. Stanwyck believed in being as natural on screen as the Hollywood glamour machine allowed, and it extended to her appearance: as Wilson makes clear, the actress was not vain. She described herself as just “average nice-looking”—no Greta Garbo or Carole Lombard or Hedy Lamar—and felt it was “a good thing” that she could “crack through with honesty.” She excelled at playing women with their own best interests in mind, tough women with hard shells, but she was also gifted at playing on the edge, where anger and defensiveness part to reveal a glinting vulnerability.

Stanwyck was one of Hollywood’s hard-working pros—a trouper who always knew her own lines, and often everybody else’s as well, was always on time, who learned the names of all the crew. She probably wouldn’t have appreciated a lot of psychologizing about her work, but it seems clear that she drew on her own rough upbringing to play many of her finest roles. Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, she was four when her pregnant mother was killed by a drunk who pushed her off a streetcar. Her bricklayer father soon ran off to Panama, abandoning the family. Young Ruby was raised by a shifting cast of relatives, and supported herself from the age of fourteen as a switchboard operator, a pattern cutter, and a chorus girl. “I’ve known women who plodded through life,” Wilson quotes her saying, “but the women I knew did their plodding on the pavement, not the soil. I know very little about the simple life. I’m a product of crowded places and jammed-up emotions, where right and wrong weren’t always clearly defined and life wasn’t always sweet, but it was life.” That life, with all its ambiguity, is what you always see in a Stanwyck performance, flickering across her uncommonly intelligent face like light dancing on water.

“Steel-True” has inspired several Stanwyck retrospectives, including one at Film Forum, in New York, playing through December 31st. It inspired me to make a list of my favorite Stanwyck performances, all of them available on DVD. Here they are, in chronological order:

1. “The Miracle Woman” (1931). A twenty-three-year-old Stanwyck plays a young evangelist in the mold of Aimee Semple McPherson in this spare and somber Frank Capra film. She’s a razzle-dazzle type who preaches to excitable crowds with lions circling around her. (“Religion is like everything else,” the huckster who manages her says. “Great if you can sell it. No good if you give it away.”) Capra was in love with his leading lady, and you can see it. Stanwyck is fierce and girlish in the scenes where she preaches; tender and remorseful when she falls in love with a man blinded in the Great War, and begins to regret her deceitful career. The ending could have been treacly but it’s not; it’s saved by a dark strangeness and the unfussy realism of Stanwyck’s performance.

2. “Ladies They Talk About” (1933). An “Orange is the New Black” of the Depression years. As a depiction of life in a woman’s prison it has some foolish bits (the cells look an awful lot like dormitories at a posh boarding school), but also some sharp treatment of both female camaraderie and competition. Watch it for Stanwyck’s pantherine saunter as she surveys her new cage, and for the sarcastic Brooklynese in which she delivers lines like this one, her character’s retort to a religious fanatic who tells her no punishment is too harsh for her: “Oh yeah? Well, being penned up here with a daffodil like you comes awful close.”

3. “Baby Face” (1933). The quintessential pre-code movie, with Stanwyck as Lily Powers, a much-pawed waitress in her father’s grimy steel-town speakeasy, who vows to use men, not be used by them. With the help of a Nietzsche-quoting old cobbler and a black maid who is more of a friend than we are used to seeing in movies from the thirties and forties, she succeeds, spectacularly. Stanwyck’s Lily Powers is crass, shameless, and full of life.

4. “Stella Dallas” (1937). One of the greatest “women’s pictures” ever made, this film is as heartbreaking on the subject of class as it is on the substance of maternal love; in King Vidor’s “Stella Dallas,” they are inseparable. “On the surface, Stella had to appear loud and flamboyant—with a touch of vulgarity,” Stanwyck said of the part. “Yet while showing her in all commonness, she had to be portrayed in a way that audiences would realize that beneath the surface her instincts were fine, heartwarming, and noble.” The slender, brunette Stanwyck wore padding that made her look thirty pounds heavier, agreed to have her hair bleached blonde, and stuffed cotton in her mouth so she’d look jowly. But her real trick was to play a slatternly character in glitter and plumes, without condescending or making her comical. Wilson quotes a co-star in “Stella Dallas” saying that Stanwyck “was an actress who worked from the inside out.” It was this “privacy” in her performances that made them last. Watch it and you’ll see what she meant.

5. “The Lady Eve” (1941). If I had to pick a single favorite Stanwyck performance, it would be this one, in this most effervescent and complex of Preston Sturges comedies. The pleasure of seeing Stanwyck’s Eve deliver Henry Fonda’s character a comeuppance for his straitlaced self-regard is only just outmatched by the inevitable pleasure of their reconciliation. Here Stanwyck’s tough dame becomes a worldlier version, but she’s still, in all the best sense of the word, a dame.

6. “Meet John Doe” (1941). It’s schmaltzy and preachy, but at the same this film is time more pointed than the other two in Capra’s patriotic, anti-corruption trilogy, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” because it deals with the spectre of home-grown Fascism. Stanwyck, as a reporter in wide-shouldered career-gal suits, manages to be as warm and as ardent as when she’s in her cynical mode, cooking up a threatened suicide by a fake Everyman to boost circulation, as she is when she’s in her chastened and soft-hearted mode. The long, fast-talking speeches she gets in “Meet John Doe” are a nice reminder that, even after all those years in Hollywood, Stanwyck never lost her Brooklyn accent. And her performance seems to elicit a special sweetness from Gary Cooper, as the hobo she makes over and falls for.

7. “Ball of Fire” (1941). The setup of Howard Hawks’s comedy is similar enough to “The Lady Eve”—Gary Cooper is a stuffy professor whose world is turned upside down by Stanwyck’s burlesque dancer—that you can’t help but compare, and I prefer “The Lady Eve,” which has many more layers to it. “The Lady Eve” plays with the Garden of Eden story and with Freudian ideas—and, as the critic Wendy Lesser notes, it does so, surprisingly, while taking the woman’s point of view. Still, if “Ball of Fire” is simpler, it does have a lot of fun with the conceit that brings the scholar and the shimmier together: Cooper’s character is collecting American slang, and Stanwyck’s is a fount of it. And Stanwyck’s confidence is charming; she’s like a cocky street urchin in spangles.

8. “Double Indemnity” (1944). If you’ve seen one film noir, it’s probably this one, and it should be. In Billy Wilder’s near-perfect film of the James M. Cain novel, Stanwyck is cold, glittering, gimlet-eyed, with a geologically deep vein of pathology. Most of the time, Stanwyck’s face is as mobile as the northern lights; as Phyllis in “Double Indemnity,” she has a glacial, eerie stillness.

9. “All I Desire” (1953). One of two movies Stanwyck made for the director Douglas Sirk, both black and white, both sudsy melodramas on the surface, and, just beneath, devastating critiques of societal smugness and conformity. Stanwyck plays an actress who split from her husband long ago and has returned home to their small town to see their daughter perform in a high-school play. She’s a woman who has to salvage her own feelings for her husband and children from the resentment and pride with which she protects herself from the town’s disapproval. What makes it harder is that her husband and one of her daughters hide their own pain behind the same disapproval: she was too stylish, too ambitious, too much, so it was just as well she left them. Stanwyck’s gift for playing ambiguous emotion never served her better than in this delicate, mature performance. (For more on “All I Desire,” see my colleague Richard Brody’s write-up of its DVD release last January.)

10. “There’s Always Tomorrow” (1956). Teamed with Fred MacMurray in this Sirk movie, Stanwyck plays another sophisticated outsider, polished and gleaming, but animated by contradictory feelings that can’t quite be labelled or confined. Here she’s an old flame of MacMurray’s toy manufacturer, a man who doesn’t know how desperately diminished he feels until she reappears in his life, reminding him of who he was before he married and settled into a somnolent, suburban existence with a placidly maternal wife and a couple of teen-agers who’ve invaded him like body snatchers.

Photograph: John Kobal Foundation/Getty

Margaret Talbot is a staff writer and the author of “The Entertainer.”